For the newbies, I just wanted to start a post that your bins will eventually hit their stride.

I started with my first pound of worms in January of 2010. I killed off most of them within six months due to overfeeding. Got another pound in the fall (and an additional pound for my then-boyfriend, now fiancee...you know he loves you if you talk him into having his very own worm bin!) and added them to the mix.

The bins have finally hit their stride. We've checked on both bins about once a month since February, and have been able to pull out about half a gallon of compost per bin each time. (We don't feed in a pattern - food just kind of goes across the bin and gets buried in bedding, sometimes chopped, sometimes ground up, sometimes whole bananas and apples and melon rinds - so we harvest by just pulling up the good stuff from the bottom.) We sort out the big worms, put the compost into smaller bins, and then when we go back to harvest again, check the smaller bins, which are usually teeming with baby worms. (Incidentally, the kids find it a blast to watch how a bin full of worm poop has babies crawling around in it a few weeks later.) We could do it less often, but it's interesting and fun for us to finally get to "play" with our worms. As the operation continues, harvesting will only happen when the bin is full.

We each keep a bucket in our freezers to hold scraps, and then nuke the whole thing and toss some in once a month. Now that smoothie season is upon us, I like tossing in scraps when my blender is already covered in muck, grinding everything up. If it's liquefied, and it goes on a single layer of cardboard, we find the worms mobbing just underneath it, like magic. They are just now getting to the point where they are eating a good amount of food.

So, newbies (and I'm just now considering myself NOT a newbie), listen to the people here...UNDERFEEDING IS THE KEY. Benign neglect WORKS. It's tough, but gosh darn it, these people know what they are talking about. Waiting is hard, but more than a year later, my original bin is finally settled and doing what it's supposed to be doing.